Voice and Mood (Essentials of Biblical Greek Grammar)

L. Mathewson David

Description

A recognized expert in Greek grammar examines two features of the Greek verb: voice and mood. Drawing on his years of teaching experience at a leading seminary, David Mathewson examines these two important topics in Greek grammar in light of modern linguistics and offers fresh insights. The book is illustrated with examples from the Greek New Testament, making it an ideal textbook for the intermediate Greek classroom. This is the first volume in a new series on Greek grammar edited by Stanley E. Porter.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493420520
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Half Title Page
Series Page
Essentials of Biblical Greek Grammar
S TANLEY E. P ORTER , series editor
Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach by David L. Mathewson
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2021 by David L. Mathewson
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2052-0
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture translations are the author’s own.
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from the Greek New Testament come from Eberhard Nestle, Erwin Nestle, Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini, and Bruce M. Metzger, eds. Novum Testamentum Graece . 28th rev. ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012.
Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.
Contents
Cover
Half Title Page i
Series Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Series Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
PART 1 Voice 5
1. Recent Scholarship on Voice 7
2. Linguistic Model and Voice 25
3. The Three Voices in New Testament Greek 51
PART 2 Mood 75
4. Recent Scholarship and Linguistic Insights on Mood 77
5. The Greek Mood System 95
6. Infinitives and Participles 137
Conclusion 169
Bibliography 173
Author Index 181
Scripture Index 185
Subject Index 189
Back Cover 192
Series Preface
I am pleased to introduce the Essentials of Biblical Greek Grammar series. This new and innovative set of volumes is designed to introduce scholars, students, and others who are interested in recent developments in Greek language studies to some of the most important topics in current discussion. This series is accessible and suitable for use in the classroom and in research.
Current treatments of the Greek language of the New Testament still often slavishly employ the categories of traditional grammar, even though there have been monumental developments in linguistic studies throughout the last century. The last thirty or so years have seen significant interest in the study of New Testament Greek from a more linguistically informed perspective, and these volumes attempt to capture and reflect that interest. Each of the volumes is written by a scholar who has made a noteworthy contribution to the discussion of Greek grammar and linguistics and who has experience teaching such concepts. These books are not designed simply to reinforce or summarize the entrenched categories often used in Greek language studies, nor do they offer only theoretical discussions. Instead, they offer linguistically informed treatments of major topics—but without getting mired in technical, theoretical language. They are designed to introduce readers to the major areas of discussion, the pertinent issues within these areas, and suitable categories that are transferable from linguistics to Greek language description—and they provide enough examples to illustrate how these topics influence exegesis. Along the way, each volume offers new proposals on how to understand its respective topic and some new ways of exegeting that will have an impact on our understanding of the New Testament.
The books within this series address some of the fundamental topics in Greek language studies but also include topics more recently incorporated into Greek linguistics. One volume treats lexical semantics, showing approaches to Greek vocabulary and suitable ways of discussing words and their meanings. Another volume discusses Greek syntax, with attention to the ways that various groupings of words, such as sentences, are organized and with attention to their meanings. One of the volumes in this series addresses the functions of the Greek mood and voice systems, presenting the most recent points of contention while making a positive proposal regarding these two important yet often overlooked categories. Another volume is dedicated to discussion of Greek verbal aspect, defining what is meant by “aspect” and proposing a straightforward way of understanding this semantic category. There is also a volume on discourse analysis, which assumes many of the kinds of discussions found in other volumes within this series but brings them into conversation as a means of examining not just words, clauses, or individual components but an entire text and how it conveys its meaning.
Every serious reader of the Greek of the New Testament will benefit from this series and be able to incorporate these insights into their own exegetical work.
Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College
Acknowledgments
Writing a book on Greek grammar these days requires being knowledgeable of the Greek language itself, while also being conversant with recent linguistic insights and how that should influence the approach to Greek grammar. The days should be past when Greek grammars are produced that do not rely on linguistic approaches. My first foray into the application of linguistics to the writing of a Greek grammar was Stanley E. Porter’s Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament . It is now my privilege to contribute a volume to a series edited by Professor Porter. I have attempted to implement insights from a particular linguistic model that I find productive in thinking about grammar, which has been the focus of attention in much of Stan’s work.
I am grateful to Stan for his confidence in me to contribute this volume to this series, and for his encouragement and interest in my ongoing work in Greek and linguistics. Lengthy conversations with him over email have enhanced this volume. I would also like to thank the Linguistics Circle at McMaster Divinity College (Hamilton, Ontario) for interacting with a presentation of much of the material in this book, and for their thoughtful and helpful comments on it. Lastly, the editorial staff at Baker Academic has been a delight to work with at all stages of the production of this work.
Introduction
Voice, Mood, and the Greek Verb System
At the center of the Greek clause stands the verb, which expresses the verbal process. It is the verb that communicates the “doings” and “happenings” within the discourse, moving the discourse forward and affecting the participants in the sentence in some way. 1 That is, a clause is primarily about the events or states in which the actors in the clause are involved or by which they are affected. The Greek verb is also the most semantically weighty element of the clause, contributing the meaningful features of aspect, voice, mood, person, and number. Therefore, an informed understanding of the Greek verb is of utmost importance for any exegesis of the Greek New Testament.
As a fusional (or inflectional) language, Greek indicates all these major features of its verbs—aspect, voice, mood, person, and number—through its “tense” endings, 2 which is why first-year Greek students spend so much time memorizing endings when they get to verbs (a change in any of these five features requires a change in the formal ending). In other words, these semantic features related to the various grammatical functions of the verb are communicated morphologically by the selection of a given verbal ending from a system of choices (e.g., singularity vs. plurality, first person vs. second person, or perfective vs. imperfective aspect). This suggests that an important linguistic principle for interpreting the Greek verbal system (or any part of the grammatical system) is that “meaning implies choice,” as the grammar can be seen as a series of meaningful choices within the language system. 3 This important linguistic notion will be developed further below. But as it applies to this volume the various semantic features of the verbal system must be considered in relationship to one another as choices from within a system (rather than examined in isolation, as most grammars do by treating the various features of verbs individualistically and discussing in isolation various functions). The purpose of this volume is to explore in some detail two of those features of the Greek verb system indicated by the verb endings that are important for interpreting the Greek New Testament: voice and mood.
Voice
Though probably not as semantically and exegetically significant as verbal aspect, voice is an important feature of the New Testament Greek verb system. Voice is indicated by the selection of a formal ending, which grammaticalizes semantically the relationship of the grammatical subject (not necessarily the agent) to the action of the verb. Most Greek grammars understand the voice system in this manner: “Voice relates the action to the subject.” 4 However, a fruitful approach that is beginning to emerge among some discussion of verbal voice is to also interpret the Greek voice system more specifically as communicating the semantic feature of causality . That is, voice “is a semantic category by which a speaker/writer grammaticalizes a perspective on how a process is caused.” 5 Is the action caused by an external agent, or is it internally caused? Therefore, voice considers how the subject relates to the verbal process in terms of causality. This way of looking at the voice system in Greek will be developed in more detail below. Though the question of the number of voices in Greek persists, as will be argued in the ensuing discussion, the Greek language exhibits three separate voices based on morphology, but more importantly semantically based on causality: active, passive, and middle. Though the voice system would see